On September 1, 1939, Hitler's forces invaded Poland. His administration established the Warsaw Ghetto, a fenced and guarded area of Warsaw to which all Poland's Jews were forced to relocate just over a year later. At its height it was inhabited by approximately 460,000 people, about 85,000 of whom were children. As conditions in the Ghetto deteriorated, a Jewish Polish historian, Dr. Emanuel Ringelblum, recruited people to create a secret record of the lives of the incarcerated Jews, an effort that became known as the Oneg Shabbat Project (see Beyond the Book). Novelist Lauren Grodstein uses this real-life archive as a basis for her book We Must Not Think of Ourselves.

Adam Paskow, who narrates the novel, is a 42-year-old widower. As the book opens, he's been recruited by Ringelblum to join the project. "Our task is to pay attention," Ringelblum tells him, "to listen to the stories." Paskow is assigned to write down "everything that's happened, from the time we wake up to when we go to sleep." When he asks why, Ringelblum responds that "It's up to us to write our own history…Deny the Germans the last word…perhaps after the war we can tell the world the truth about what happened." The rest of the novel comprises Paskow's entry for the Oneg Shabbat archive, containing not only his own experiences, history and what he's observing day-to-day, but also interviews with his neighbors in the Ghetto.

The result is a detailed, vivid portrait of Ghetto life. Much of what Paskow's narration conveys is rather mundane—a beleaguered population making the best of an increasingly intolerable situation—particularly in the novel's first half. Through Paskow's interviews we learn how the housewives and children around him cope with such deprivation. We read about people's former lives, their desires and dreams, their loves, and their hopes for a better future. These characters leap off the page; each is unique and beautifully drawn, with their own perspective on their ordeal. These sections read like actual transcripts, with realistic digressions and segues. Sometimes funny, sometimes tragic, sometimes harrowing, the stories form a beautiful mosaic describing the lives of those trapped in the Ghetto.

Also remarkable is the author's depiction of Paskow himself. As his story progresses, he relays his struggle to maintain his humanity, to continue to care about those around him even as doing so jeopardizes his own survival. He gradually transforms from a relatively optimistic individual ("They can't kill all of us…it's illogical") to someone who knows the situation is beyond hope ("But now I realize that we are creating a portrait of Polish Jews at the end of our history—not one peculiar moment, but the very last moment"). He's a character readers come to care deeply about.

Needless to say, any novel about the Warsaw Ghetto is unlikely to be a happy one, and this one is no exception. Even the chapters depicting the commonplace are peppered with random acts of violence and scenes of horror ("[S]ome of us had to step over starved corpses on the sidewalk"). A late plot twist sends the action into overdrive, but until then the book is mostly concerned with little things, like teaching poetry to school children or enjoying the rare treat of dried apricots. As a result, this is a slow burn of a novel, one that almost imperceptibly gets under your skin—and then remains lodged in your thoughts long after the final page.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a worthy addition to the genre of Holocaust literature. It's a must-read for anyone interested in World War II history—a rare novel that depicts the ordinary in a compelling way. I highly recommend it for all audiences, including book groups who enjoy historical fiction.

Reviewed by Kim Kovacs

Write your own review

Rated 5 out of 5 by JHSiess
Elevates the Genre: One of the Best Books of 2023
Author Lauren Grodstein believes that had her great-grandparents not left Warsaw twenty years before World War II, she likely would not have been born. She first learned about the Oneg Shabbat Archive in 2019 when she traveled to Poland with her family and they “stumbled into” the Archive, one wall of which bears the words “What we’ve unable to shout out to the world.” Displayed there are notebooks, paintings and drawings, and one of the large milk cans in which those documents were buried so that they, fortunately, withstood the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943. Grodstein recalls that as they were leaving, she observed, “There are a thousand novels in that room,” to which her sister replied, “Maybe you should write one.” She then spent a full year researching and pondering the story because she wanted to be sure she could “do justice to those people and their stories, and honor them.”

“It is up to us to write our own history. Deny the Germans the last word.” We Must Not Think of Ourselves opens with that December 1940 entreaty to fictional Adam Paskow. He is enlisted to record “all the details, even if they seem insignificant,” as part of an archival project so that after World War II, the world will know “the truth about what happened.” Adam agrees, accepting the risk that if his activities are discovered, he will likely be executed. The archive group is called Oneg Shabbat, meaning “the joy of the Sabbath.”

Adam begins with his own history. In a first-person narrative, he explains that he is a Jewish English teacher living in a cramped apartment with two other families, teaching about four to six students in the basement of a bombed-out movie theater. He met his wife, Kasia, when they were both studying English literature in college. She was the Catholic daughter of a wealthy and influential official with the Polish government. They married in 1930 and were happy, even though they were never able to have children, until she died tragically. Even after her death, her father, Henryk, who at least ostensibly accepted his daughter’s marriage to a Jewish man, continued serving as Adam’s benefactor, enabling him to continue residing in their stylish apartment on his public teacher’s salary. After being forced to relocate to the Ghetto, Adam resolved to continue teaching, despite having no novels, short stories, or textbooks, and committed to assigning to his pupils only uplifting and joyous poems that he memorized over the years. His students attend class sporadically, largely because they are often engaging in forbidden bartering or stealing in an effort to gather enough food for their families to survive.

A year after Germany invaded Poland, Adam still struggles to understand world events and the purported logic behind them. He remains understandably baffled by the bombardment and decimation of his homeland, and the unbridled atrocities he has already witnessed. He cannot fathom what the Polish people may have done to provoke the “terrorizing of children, the stabbing of old men on the streets, the rape of our young women, and the public hanging of our soldiers.” He could have fled to Palestine to reside with his brother and mother, but like so many others, he stayed. “We had our lives and our livelihoods, and couldn’t envision starting over somewhere” else. “I’ll wait for the Allies, I suppose,” Adam told his father-in-law, when Henryk offered to secure a Polish kennkarte (passport) for him. (Henryk suspiciously sought to retrieve jewelry he gifted Kasia -- items Adam viewed as a potential safety net) Adam could not foresee, of course, that the Germans would rob him and his fellow Jews of much more than their money, prohibiting them from practicing their professions, forcing them out of their homes and synagogues, denying them basic civil rights, and, finally, taking their freedom, insisting they had to be relocated because they “carried disease.” Only when Adam arrives at his new apartment does he realize that he has been double-crossed by Henryk and the apartment he believed he would solely occupy will, in fact, also be home to the Lescovec and Wiskoff families and their total of five rambunctious sons. With no options, they all agree “to try to live our lives peaceably . . . until a better situation presents itself.” The gates to the new district in which they are forced to reside were locked on November 16, 1940.

To relate the stories of those he interviews for the project, Grodstein includes Adam’s notes. Their histories are fascinating, absorbing, and largely heartbreaking. As the days pass, their living conditions worsen and they do not have enough food. But there is a black market and Adam saved some valuable items to trade, a dangerous endeavor, in order to help feed the children who are part of his household. Adam’s narrative is straightforward and candid, his descriptions of the horrors of life in the Ghetto and the brutalities he witnesses unsparing, but essential to an understanding of his experiences and emotions.

Adam is principled, dedicated to his students, and likable. His story is completely gripping and sympathetic. His naivete is evident, as Grodstein illustrates, in part, through his interactions with other characters. He grows close to his housemates, especially Sala Wiskoff, who is focused on keeping her two sons alive. They are actively smuggling food, while her husband, Emil, has been leveled by grief over the death of his mother. Sala ponders whether they are “really are just waiting here to die.” Adam rationalizes that “they can’t kill all of us. What would be the gain in that? It’s illogical. And the Nazis pride themselves on being logical.” Isolated and cut off from the rest of the world, Adam and his fellow prisoners in the Ghetto have no idea what is actually taking place beyond the locked gates. But their musings and struggle to find reason in a world gone mad is fascinating, thought-provoking, and enlightening, especially when considered through the lens of history.

Grodstein has deftly created a cast of vibrant characters whose stories are mesmerizing. Szifra Joseph, a beautiful and intelligent fifteen-year-old who was Adam’s student before the war, is one of the most memorable. Her family was wealthy – her father owned a clothing factory which was commandeered by the Germans – but now her mother, on the verge of complete mental collapse, toils in a brush factory and her younger brothers risk their lives foraging for food. Her family has connections to the Warner Brothers in Hollywood, and she plans to use those connections to make her way to California once the Ghetto is liberated. Because of all she has been through, she is angry, outspoken, cynical, and jaded. She believes she can secure her family’s safety through manipulation and persuasion, relying on her charms to gain favor with their captors. She is certain she can obtain kennkartes that will enable them to escape. “It is my choice to take charge of my life and my goals and protect my family and rely on the good graces of whomever can help me,” she tells Afam.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is moving and emotionally impactful because, remarkably, Grodstein manages, seemingly effortlessly, to craft an engrossing story that is both uplifting and life-affirming. Despite everything he must ensure, Adam finds love and it helps sustain him as, with each passing day, matters grow more dire. The relationship is undeniably born from the circumstances in which Adam and the woman find themselves, but the ways in which they cling to and comfort each other are believable, understandable, and deeply affecting. Grodstein says it was “very important to me to shine a light in the darkness. Even with material as serious as this, to provide some sense that life could get better at the end.” Indeed, as the late Harvey Milk wisely observed, “You cannot live on hope alone, but without it, life is not worth living.” Despite his experiences, Adam – in part because he is too naïve and inherently decent to imagine the extent and types of evil the Nazis will eventually unleash – is able to maintain hope that the Allies will in fact rescue him and the others. His commitment to the archive is evidence of his optimism and belief that the world will someday know the truth about exactly what transpired in the Ghetto. Which is not to say that his confidence is unfailing. He fights not to fall into permanent dispair, at one point convinced that "we are creating a portrait of Polish Jews at the end of our history.” However, Grodstein credibly shows that holding on to optimism and hope leads to triumph, even if not without sacrifice.

We Must Not Think of Ourselves is one of the best books of 2023, a stand-out tale on bookshelves crowded with volumes of World War II historical fiction. Grodstein elevates the genre because of the compassionate, measured, and seamless way she relates the various ways in which Adam and the other characters refuse to give up, give in, or relinquish their identities and histories . . . or abandon their commitment to the truth. In addition to being an absorbing and deeply moving exploration of events that occurred in a particular time and place to a specific group of people, it is also both contemporary and timely, a warning against complacency and a conviction that history is incapable of repeating itself. She says her motivation for penning the book was a “desire to honor those who remained, who died, and who left us their words. . . . I did my best to hear, and to share, what they could not shout out to the world.” We Must Not Think of Ourselves is inarguably the loving and riveting homage she envisioned.

Thanks to NetGalley for an Advance Reader's Copy and BookBrowse for a physical copy of the book in conjunction with its First Impressions program.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Catherine O’C
Raw and Realistic
I have read hundreds, if not thousands of novels set during World War II. The novel We Must Not Think of Ourselves is one in its own class. This novel takes place in a Polish ghetto over the course of almost 2 years. During that time the residents become increasingly impoverished, hungry, and desperate. What sets this novel apart is that the characters are realistic people, not heroes. This novel seems so raw and heartbreaking as it shows the Jewish inhabitants trying to normalize their existence in this purgatory while wondering how the world has forgotten about them. The slow realization that they are headed toward annihilation seems so cruel and unbearable, yet we know this was true. Ms. Grodstein has given a voice to those ordinary Polish citizens who lived and died in the Warsaw ghetto. This novel will remain in my heart and I will encourage my reading friends as well as my book club to read it.

Rated 5 out of 5 by cindy r
human evil
WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES (AlgonquinBooks) by Lauren Grodstein is a thought-provoking eyewitness account of WWII. It's based on diaries that can be found in the Oneg Shabbat Archives in Warsaw. I was not aware of this particular story and it left me speechless.

Adam Poskow was a 40-year-old childless widow and professor who was sent to the Warsaw ghetto by his Catholic father-in-law. Poskow keeps diaries of other people living in the ghetto, so their memories and dreams are preserved and not forgotten.

He documents the horrors of living in the ghetto. He writes a first person uncompromising narrative about the people who have to beg for food, have mental breakdowns, are killed in the streets by Nazis for no reason and see their bodies for food and passports. But despite this treatment some people are hopeful and dream of escaping their Nazis imprisonment to another country.

WE MUST NOT THINK OF OURSELVES is a difficult emotional read. Despite Grodstein's outstanding storytelling and brilliant writing, I still can't even imagine experiencing what these people did. It explains the importance of this novel because we must never forget the Nazis killed six-million Jews during WWII.

NEVER AGAIN.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Diane
So much more than a chronicle of suffering.
In recording the history of what is happening in the ghetto, we see not only the daily cruelties, but also stories of love, kindness, sacrifice, and hope.

Rated 5 out of 5 by Lawal Temiloluwa Dorcas
Not being self-centered
This book teaches us not to be self-centered but caring about others too.